UTA BRIESEWITZ (CINEMATOGRAPHER): I read the pilot several times because I felt like there was a lot going on. Many characters are being introduced. I felt like, “This is something really complex we’re setting up here.” Even I sometimes felt confused shooting the pilot.
LAURA SCHWEIGMAN (SCRIPT SUPERVISOR): I was there for the scene with a shooting where Snot Boogie was killed and lying in the street. That was my first really long overnight shoot I had ever done. Everything was just very real. If you looked away from the movie cameras, I just thought to myself, Wow. I see this. I see this when I drive around in Baltimore. It was sad, but it was, at the same time, amazing, how real it felt, how real it looked.
BENJAMIN BUSCH (OFF. ANTHONY COLICCHIO): That first scene with Dominic West and Snot Boogie, you already knew the show got the street right. It was beautiful in its depiction of that space. The ugly alleys were fascinating. It was a strange combination in The Wire of both cinematic beauty and that play with the line between that and photojournalism, documentary filmmaking. Those two are combined almost like [William] Friedkin and The French Connection. I was a visual artist. My father was a writer. The Wire combined the two for me. I enjoyed it visually, and it was just so smart, the way it went after a story. The Wire didn’t allow you to predict anything, much like your life. It didn’t allow you to guess who would succeed or how and who would fall, with any accuracy.
The Wire was a show of shit happening and it happens to you. Over and over again. You either bring it on yourself or you’re a collateral casualty or you feel for someone else who falls. You talk about how drama intersects. I was on the set when my father died. He died of a heart attack in New York City, while I was finishing a scene I knew he would love. I, being a particular bastard, I was pouring out some beer on a guy we were arresting, that scene where we’re just busting people for anything, open alcohol laws, etcetera. I went to Dominic West’s trailer to have him sign copies of Rock Star, which had come out. I have a number of friends who are musicians. We all love that movie. Dominic West plays the guitarist. I went from his trailer, home to my wife with the phone. I turned right around and raced right to New York, right through Baltimore, where I had just been. So, I was actually on set thinking, My dad’s going to love this scene. He loved The Wire. That’s as far as he made it with that season. He never saw all that work.
KAREN THORSON (PRODUCER): We had to fight to keep the epigraph because the Directors Guild does not like anything between the director’s name and the show. The director must get the last credit, and their claim was, “Well, you can’t have the title of the show after the director’s name. The director has to come after the title of the show.” We said, “But this is not the title of the show. This is an epigraph. It is part of the show. It is the first frame of the show, so the director’s name is coming before the first frame of the show.” Getting that layout needed to be approved by the guild. Nowhere in the episode does the title of the show ever appear. Episode One is “The Target,” but the epigraph is “…when it’s not your turn,” by McNulty.
VINCENT PERANIO (PRODUCTION DESIGNER): The first season takes place in Section Eight high-rise housing. Six months before, Baltimore tore the last high-rises down. So, we didn’t have any high-rises. We were scouting around looking and found some Section Eight housing that were low-rises next to a high-rise for senior citizens. So, every week, I had to take the bottom three floors of that building and put cages up and make it look like Section Eight housing.
We were walking through the low-rises in that neighborhood, and there, by a Dumpster, was that orange couch. It was from the seventies, Mediterranean, crushed orange velvet and torn and soiled, but it seemed perfect for the script. I asked the people in charge of the housing development if I could just put this in a vacant house or something, just until we start doing the film. They did, and a month later, when we started working on the film, we put it in the middle of the court, and it surprisingly became a main part of the script. It was the hangout.
Well, we did our pilot. It came out nice, and then the show was over until HBO decided whether to pick it up, which usually is months of waiting. Within three weeks, they decided to pick it up. I was talking to my decorator. I said, “Well, at least we have the orange couch.” He went mute. I said, “Oh no. You didn’t do it. You didn’t do it.” He said, “Yes, we threw it out.”
NINA K. NOBLE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER): I had to go back to Vince Peranio and say, “You know that couch that we got rid of? We need to get it back.” Of course, we couldn’t get it back, so we found a couch that was very similar, and Vince found a fabric that was somewhat similar, and we got it reupholstered and hoped that David wouldn’t notice.
VINCENT PERANIO (PRODUCTION DESIGNER): We just started designing the couch all over again. We had it built. We had to go to England to get orange crushed velvet, which was not particularly in in the 2000s. Then, when it was finally, totally finished, we aged it, cut it up, pulled the stuffing out. And it looked pretty close to the real thing. We just set it up there in all its glory the first day of shooting, and nothing was mentioned about it again.
DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I didn’t know it at the time, no. He told me later in the season, once we’d established. He said, “We had a little bit of an emergency with the couch.” They sold the second couch as the first.
NINA K. NOBLE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER): That was the irony of it. That was a cheap thrift shop couch, which we then had to custom-upholster at great expense in order to duplicate.
VINCENT PERANIO (PRODUCTION DESIGNER): It really kind of became an icon, the orange couch. A year into filming, I was reading a New York Times Magazine and the cover of the magazine was about new urban fashion, and it was an orange couch in the middle of a Manhattan street. So, I know somebody had seen the film that year.
UTA BRIESEWITZ (CINEMATOGRAPHER): In the pilot, we established, “When we go to the projects, we go handheld.” After a couple of episodes, I approached Bob Colesberry and I said, “What these drug dealers are doing is so well-thought-out, I just don’t see like it deserves any less control, visual style, or elegance, than we are trying to apply outside the projects. If anything at all, we should portray them the same way.” That’s where I think we changed things, and we were all shooting the projects from dolly instead of just going handheld there. He agreed and he went with it, and that was the great thing and the wonderful thing with me and my collaboration with Bob. Bob just really liked what I did, and he gave me freedom. He was just supportive. He was the guy behind the monitor, and he was nodding his head and giving the thumbs-up. It was a great way of working. I experienced unbelievable freedom while I was working on The Wire.
KAREN THORSON (PRODUCER): Uta and Bob really collaborated well. I see a lot of homages to certain setups that Bob particularly liked. He liked the work of Gordon Willis. In Rawls’s office, Rawls is standing against the window, emerging out of the darkness, when he has that encounter with McNulty, flipping the two birds when he’s really angry with him for having stirred up business with the judge.
DEBI YOUNG (MAKEUP DEPARTMENT HEAD): I used to work for the police department when David would come in to get the stats from the things that had happened. I worked in the nine-one-one center. This is way before The Wire. Because I knew that Ed was a homicide detective and that David was a journalist, I had to make sure that everything was on point, because they would know if it wasn’t, as far as how the person looked when they died. My key makeup artist, Sandy [Linn Koepper], had found this pathology book, and we had it in the makeup chair as one of our reference books. Because it had real dead people in it, I couldn’t look at it. It just bothered me so much to see these dead people and how they had died. The photographs were very vivid.
We had a consultant from the medical examiner’s office when we started. What I did to get around that, when I would read something in the script and they would have it so vividly described in the writing, I would c
all the medical examiner’s office to speak to the consultant, and I would say something like, “So, if I had a body that’s been floating in the harbor for thirty days and it’s in the middle of February, how would he look?” The medical examiner would then describe it to me, and then I would jot down his description and then I could translate it into makeup. It was the easiest way for me.
BRUCE LITECKY (SOUND MIXER): They were convinced in some ways that the wiretap had to be really sort of dirty and hard to hear, but we also had to give the audience something to listen to, so there was always a back-and-forth about that. A ground was found where there was enough information for people to follow along, but not so much that it didn’t leave a sense of mystery to the whole procedure.
It being called The Wire and being about wiretapping, it was about the eavesdropping and listening in. That was a really important thing on that show. You really had to listen.
KAREN THORSON (PRODUCER): [Tom Waits] wanted to see what we were up to, visually, and how the story was coming, and he wanted to see a cut of the show, which made sense. When we were producing The Wire the first couple of years, we were still using VHS for screeners. We had a timeline, and so we FedEx him a VHS player and a tape, and he said, “Well, I got the tape, but I don’t know how to work the machine. I have to set it up, and my wife’s the only one that can do that, so that’ll be tomorrow.” That made David Simon chuckle. There was nothing we could do. We had to wait for the machine to get set up so he could watch it, and he called fairly quickly after seeing it and said he would participate.
What was interesting is changing the performer from season to season. That wasn’t clear to me right away that that’s what was going on in David’s mind, and I’m not sure that he had that fully formed, either. He wanted the voice of the vocals to reflect the main theme of the content of the season. That’s why we have kids doing it, for example, on Season Four, when the focus of the storyline is what happens to the kids and how they get into the drug trade or how do they avoid it.
BLAKE LEYH (MUSIC SUPERVISOR): While we were working on the pilot, I wrote the tune that became the end credit music for the show. Still, from seeing the pilot episode, I didn’t have a very high opinion of the show. It just seemed to me like a slightly more glitzy cop show. I didn’t understand HBO. To me, they seemed like a functionally inexperienced kid. Then, a couple months later, I remember also having an exchange with Nina Noble, where we were watching the finished mix, and there was a scene with Wallace in it, and I remember saying to Nina, “Maybe someday someone will make a TV show where they star that character. I’d like to see that. That would be much more interesting to me than this copsy-joke stuff.”
She said, “Well, if we get to really make the show, maybe we’ll go there and you’ll stick around to see that.” I was like, “Yeah, right.” That was my beginning on the show. Then the show got picked up, and they asked me to come back and work on the sound, but also on the music. Honestly, I still wasn’t very excited about it.
ED BIANCHI (DIRECTOR): I do like the idea that there was no scored music for the show. It went to the realness. It was so raw. I think that was part of it. Nothing was sweetened. Nothing told you what to feel in terms of music, where music usually pushes you. Just words and pictures are telling you.
ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): When they said “Action,” first day we started shooting, I pretty much stayed in character as much as I could, because I didn’t want to fuck up. I knew that I’m a people person. I like talking to people. I like being around people. I said, “I don’t want to be going back and forth, because I don’t know if I have the discipline to jump in and out of character at that time.” It was my first show. I was like, “Let me stay in character as much as I can.” I stayed in character. I stayed by myself a little bit. I stayed in the trailer until the last minute. They put me in my wardrobe. I wore it as much as I could, just to feel the dirt and the grime of somebody being out in the street all the time.
The first scene we shot was me and Johnny, going to just cop something, easy fiend. It wasn’t that much dialogue. It wasn’t a wordy scene. We just go to the corner, go into the pit, and buy something and walk away. I remember doing the scene. It was the first take. I did it, and [director] Clark Johnson came up to me, and he’s like, “That was great. That was good. We’re going to come in closer now. That was a wide shot. You guys are doing good.” He pulled me to the side, and he was like, “Are you going to be you or are you going to be Ratso Rizzo?” I was like, “What are you talking about?” He was like, “Nothing. I was just saying, I see a little too much Ratso Rizzo.” I was like, “What the fuck does that mean?”
I walked away and I started thinking about it. I remember seeing Midnight Cowboy with Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo. He had this little walk. He had this little shuffle. I guess, unbeknownst to me, I was doing that little shuffle. I didn’t know I was doing it, but when he said that, what happened was this whole internal challenge in my mind was like, I’m no fucking copycat. I’m not doing that. I’m doing Bubbles. I’m not doing Ratso Rizzo. I really had to trust myself and concentrate even more. In my mind, it felt like one of them Jay-Z songs. Allow me to reintroduce myself. My name is Dre. This is my character. It worked, because all of a sudden, I just really started having blackout moments. When the director yelled, “Cut,” I didn’t know what I just did. I was just in the moment. I was in the zone. Bubbles was doing what Bubbles would do.
It really forced me to be more Method without being in the danger of actually taking drugs. You always heard that in acting class, acting is not doing, it’s being, or some shit. I think I really just became Bubs. Bubbles became me, so to speak. After that, that whole first season, I couldn’t tell you what I did in the scenes. I had to rewatch it. I don’t remember some of the stuff I did. I was really immersed in it. It was probably the most transcending, best time of my life as far as an artist, because it’s when everything clicked. Everything clicked, and I think it was helpful that we were in Baltimore. It felt like a big stage. Everything was saturated to help all of us as artists. Everybody on that set, in my mind, all the actors, all we had to do was look to the left or look to the right and we were inspired by the city of Baltimore, by the people in Baltimore, of how these characters were supposed to live and be portrayed.
Baltimore being the place that it was, there was really not much to do out there unless you wanted to get in trouble. We weren’t trying to get in trouble. Everybody wanted to do a good job. Everybody stayed together. We would be in the hotel. We would be talking to each other, talking about the scenes, arguing about certain things. We really held each other accountable. If I wasn’t shooting that day and Sonja was shooting, I could either be at the bar, I could be spending my per diem, or I could be on set. Why not be on set watching my fellow actor? I would be there, and we would be looking at each other. That’s never really done, as far as I know, at any other show, where I can look at a fellow actor and go, “That was whack.” We were just really, really looking out for each other. We really brought into the situation. It was about the story and not about the egos.
LEO FITZPATRICK (JOHNNY WEEKS): I know a lot of junkies. I always wanted to bring a little bit of a human element to it, because junkies are always shown in such a bad light. But they’re fuckin’ somebody’s kid or somebody’s girlfriend. They’re fuckin’ people, too. They’re just caught up in some bad shit. I think makeup was just sort of embellishing my bad genes. There wasn’t anything too over the top. It was just like, “All right, let’s just make him look yellow.” It wasn’t anything too extreme. Then, strangely, outside of that, I’d never shot heroin or done heroin. But the guy that worked the props department, who showed me how to shoot heroin, ended up being one of my best friends.
ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): While we were doing the pilot, I had a conversation with Ed Burns. He came to me, and Ed Burns wasn’t really a talkative guy, but
he fucks your head up. You ask Ed Burns, “You watch the football game? I want to know who won.” He’ll be like, “Is that what you do with your life? You want to watch a game? The world is being destroyed and you just want to watch a football game?” He just breaks it down.
Ed Burns, he came to me one day, like, “You’re doing a good job. You’re really doing good. Bubbles was my snitch. He was my informant.” At that point, with the whole audition process, I didn’t know Bubbles was a real character. I was like, “What?” He was like, “Bubbles is my informant.” I was like, “Why didn’t you tell me? I would have been asking you for research. I would have been asking you questions.” He was like, “Because you were doing a good job. Why muck it up?” Then he told me, “If we were going on the look of Bubbles, Lance Reddick would have gotten the job. He was number two. We heard you might have had some trepidation playing the character. If you said no, we’d [have given] it to Lance Reddick, because Lance Reddick looks like the real Bubbles.”
I was like, “Lance is six-two, big. Why the fuck did you cast me, then, if Bubbles looks like that?” He said, “Because you had more of the essence of what Bubbles was about, the human spirit of who he was. He’s a nice guy. This dude had a habit. He still wanted to be functional in society. He still cared. You had more of that essence of who Bubbles was.” I was honored by that. Of course, my mother was like, “What the fuck you mean my son’s got the essence of a junkie? What the fuck you talking about?”
PETER GERETY (JUDGE DANIEL PHELAN): Bubbles just drove me nuts. I just thought, Where did they get this heroin addict? And then, the next week, there was a cast party in some bar in New York, and there was Andre Royo, who plays Bubbles, and he’s the sweetest guy. He’s just a really good actor, that’s all.
All the Pieces Matter Page 5